by Wilbur Smith
They spoke up, one after the other, and no man argued against Bazo’s vision, until the turn came back to Babiaan.
‘My brother Somabula has spoken the truth, you are no puppy, Bazo. Tell us only one thing more, when will it be?’
‘That I cannot tell you.’
‘Who can?’
Bazo looked down at Tanase, who still knelt at his feet.
‘We have assembled in this valley for good reason,’ Bazo told them. ‘If all agree, then my woman who is an intimate of the Umlimo, and an initiate of the mysteries, will go up to the sacred cavern to take the oracle.’
‘She must go immediately.’
‘No, Baba.’ Tanase’s lovely head was still bowed in deep respect. ‘We must wait until the Umlimo sends for us.’
There were places where the scars had knotted into hard lumps in Bazo’s flesh. The machine-gun bullets had done deep damage. One arm, fortunately not the spear arm, was twisted and shortened, permanently deformed. After hard marching or exercise with the weapons of war, or after the nervous tension of planning and arguing and persuading others to his views, the torn and lumpy flesh often seized up in agonizing spasms.
Kneeling beside him in the little reed hut, Tanase could see the cramped muscles and rigid contraction of sinews under his dark skin twisted like living black mambas trying to escape from a silken bag. With strong tapered fingers, she worked the ointment of fat and herbs into the crested muscle down his spine and the shoulder-blades, following the rubbery contractions up his neck to the base of his skull. Bazo groaned at the sweet agony of her bone-hard fingers, but slowly he relaxed and the knotted muscles subsided.
‘You are good for me in so many ways,’ he murmured.
‘I was born for no other reason,’ she answered, but Bazo sighed and shook his head slowly.
‘You and I were both born for some purpose which is still hidden from us. We know that – we are different, you and I.’
She touched his lips with her finger to still him. ‘We will come back to that on the morrow.’
She placed both hands on his shoulders and drew him backwards, until he lay flat on the reed mat, and she began to work on his chest and the rigid muscles of his flat hard belly.
‘Tonight there is only us,’ she repeated, in the throaty purr of a lioness at the kill, delighting in the power she could wield over him with the mere pressure of her fingertips, and yet at the same time consumed by a tenderness so deep that she felt her chest crushing beneath the weight of it. ‘Tonight we are all the world.’ She leaned forward and touched the bullet-wounds with the tip of her tongue and his arousal was so massive that she could not encompass it within the span of her thumb and long pink-lined fingers.
He tried to sit up, but she held him down with a light pressure against his chest, then she slipped the drawstring of her apron and with a single movement straddled him, both of them crying out involuntarily at the heat and terrible yearning of each other’s bodies. Then they were swept away together in a sudden exquisite fury.
When it had passed, she cradled his head against her bosom, and crooned to him like an infant, until his breathing was deep and regular in the dark hut. Even then, though she was silent, she did not sleep with him but lay and marvelled that such rage and compassion could possess her at the same moment in time.
‘I will never know peace again,’ she realized suddenly. ‘And nor will he.’ And she mourned for the man she loved, and for the need to goad and drive him on towards the destiny that she knew awaited both of them.
On the third day the messenger of the Umlimo came down from the cavern to where the indunas waited in the village.
The messenger was a pretty girl-child with a solemn expression and old wise eyes. She was on the very edge of puberty with the hard little stones already forming in her mulberry-dark nipples and the first light fuzz shading the deep cleft in the angle of her thighs. Around her neck she wore a talisman that only Tanase recognized. It was a sign that one day this child in her turn would take on the sacred mantle of the Umlimo and preside in the gruesome cavern in the cliff above the village.
Instinctively the child looked to Tanase where she squatted to one side of the ranks of men, and with her eyes and a secret hand sign of the initiates, Tanase indicated Somabula, the senior induna. The child’s indecision was merely a symptom of the swift degeneration of Matabele society. In the time of the kings no one, child nor adult, would have been in any doubt as to the order of precedence.
When Somabula rose to follow the messenger, his half-brothers rose with him, Babiaan on one hand and Gandang on the other.
‘You also, Bazo,’ Somabula said, and though Bazo was younger and more junior than some of them, none of the other indunas protested at his inclusion in the mission.
The child-witch took Tanase’s hand, for they were sisters of the dark spirits, and the two of them led the way up the steep path. The mouth of the cavern was a hundred paces wide, but the roof was barely high enough to clear a man’s head. Once long ago the opening had been fortified with blocks of dressed stone, worked in the same fashion as the walls of Great Zimbabwe, but these had been tumbled into rough piles, leaving gaps like those in an old man’s teeth.
The little party halted involuntarily. The four indunas hung back and drew closer together, as though to take comfort from each other. Men who had wielded the assegai in a hundred bloody battles and run onto the guns of the white men’s laager were fearful now as they faced the dark entrance.
In the silence a voice spoke suddenly from above them, emanating from the bare cliff-face of smooth lichen-streaked granite. ‘Let the indunas of royal Kumalo enter the sacred place!’ They were the quavering discordant tones of an ancient bedlam, and the four warriors looked up fearfully, but there was no living thing to be seen, and none of them could summon the courage to reply.
Tanase had felt the child’s hand quiver slightly in her grip at the ventriloquist effort of projection, and only Tanase was so attuned to the ways of the witches that she knew how the art of the voices was taught to the apprentices of the Umlimo. The child was already highly skilled, and Tanase shuddered involuntarily as she realized what other fearful skills she must have mastered, what other gruesome ordeals and terrible agonies she must already have endured. In a moment of empathy she squeezed the child’s narrow cool hand, and together they stepped through the ruined portals.
Behind them the four noble warriors crowded with the temerity of children, peering around them anxiously and stumbling on the uneven footing. The throat of the cavern narrowed, and Tanase thought with a flash of grim humour that it was as well that the light was too bad for the indunas to make out clearly the walls on either hand, for even their warlike courage might have been unequal to the horror of the catacombs.
In a bygone age that the verbal history of the Rozwi and the Karanga tribes could no longer recount, generations before bold Mzilikazi led his tribe into these hills, another plundering marauder had passed this way. It might have been Manatassi, the legendary conquering queen, at the head of her merciless hordes, laying waste to the land and slaughtering everything in her path, sparing neither woman nor child nor even the domestic animals.
The threatened tribes had taken refuge in this valley, but the marauders had burst through the narrow pass and the miserable host had fled into their final sanctuary in this cavern. The roof overhead was still coated with soot, for the marauders had not deemed it worthwhile to lay siege to the cavern. They had pulled down the protecting wall and blocked the entrance with piles of green brush and wood. Then they had put in fire. The entire tribe had perished, and smoke had mummified their remains. So they had lain down the years in banks and heaps, piled as high as the low roof.
As Tanase’s party went forward, from somewhere ahead of them a faint bluish light grew in intensity, until Bazo exclaimed suddenly and pointed to the wall of human debris beside him. In places, the parchment-like flesh had peeled away so that the ivory skulls grinned at them, and th
e contorted skeletal arms seemed to wave a macabre salutation as they passed. The indunas were bathed in sweat, despite the cool gloom, and their expressions were awed and sickly.
Tanase and the child followed the twisting pathway with unerring familiarity, and came out at last above a deep natural amphitheatre. A single ray of sunlight burned down from a narrow crack in the domed cavern roof. On the floor of the amphitheatre was an open fireplace, and a tendril of pale blue smoke twisted slowly upwards towards the opening high above. Tanase and the child led them down the rock steps to the smooth sandy floor of the amphitheatre, and at her gesture the four indunas sank down gratefully and squatted facing the smouldering fire.
Tanase released the child’s hand, and sat a little to one side and behind the men. The child crossed to the far wall and took a handful of herbs from one of the big round clay pots that stood there. She threw the handful upon the fire and immediately a great yellow cloud of acrid smoke billowed upwards, and as it slowly cleared, the indunas started and exclaimed with superstitious dread.
A grotesque figure faced them from across the flames. It was an albino, with silver-white leprous skin. It was a woman, for the great pale breasts were massively pendulous, the nipples a painful boiled pink colour. She was stark naked and her dense public bush was white as frost-struck winter grass, and above it her belly hung in loose balconies of fat. Her forehead was low and sloped backwards, her mouth was wide and thin so that she appeared toadlike. Across her broad and flattened nose and her pale cheeks, the unpigmented skin had erupted in a tender raw rash. Her thickened forearms were folded across her belly and her thighs, splotched with large ginger-coloured freckles, were wide-spread as she knelt on a mat of zebra skin and regarded the men before her fixedly.
‘I see you, oh Chosen One,’ Somabula greeted her. Despite an enormous effort of will, his voice trembled.
The Umlimo made no response, and Somabula rocked back on his heels and was silent. The girl-child was busy amongst the pots, and now she came forward and knelt beside the gross albino, proffering the clay pipe she had prepared.
The Umlimo took the long reed stem between her thin silvery lips, and the girl lifted a live coal from the fire with her bare hands and placed it on the vegetable ball in the bowl of the pipe. It began to glow and splutter and the Umlimo drew a slow lungful and then let the aromatic smoke trickle out of her simian nostrils. Immediately the heavy sweetish odour of insanghu carried to the waiting men.
The oracle was induced in different ways. Before Tanase had lost the power, it had descended spontaneously upon her, throwing her into convulsive fits, while the spirit voices struggled to escape from her throat. However, this grotesque successor had to resort to the wild hemp pipe. The seeds and flowers of the Cannabis sativa plant, crushed in the green and moulded into sun-dried balls, were her key to the spirit world.
She smoked quietly, a dozen short inhalations without allowing the smoke to escape, holding it in until her pale face seemed to swell and the pink pupils of her eyes glazed over. Then she expelled the smoke with an explosive exhalation, and started again. The indunas watched her with such fascination that they did not at first notice the soft scratching sound on the cavern floor. It was Bazo who at last started and grunted with shock, and involuntarily grasped his father’s forearm. Gandang exclaimed and began to rise in horror and alarm, but Tanase’s voice arrested him.
‘Do not move. It is dangerous,’ she whispered urgently, and Gandang sank back and froze into stillness.
From the dark recesses in the back of the cavern a lobster-like creature scuttled across the pale sandy floor towards where the Umlimo squatted. The firelight glinted on the glossy armoured carapace of the creature as it reached the Umlimo, and then began to climb up her bloated silver-white body. It paused in her lap, with the long segmented tail lifting and pulsing, its spiderlike legs hooked into the Umlimo’s coarse white pubic curls, before it began climbing again, up over her bulging belly, hanging from one drooping pale breast like some evil fruit on the bough, upwards it climbed, onto her shoulder and then it reached the angle of her jaw below the ear.
The Umlimo remained unperturbed, sipping little puffs of the narcotic smoke from the mouthpiece of her pipe, her pink eyes staring blindly at the indunas. The huge glittering insect crawled up her temple and then sideways until it stopped in the centre of her crusted and scabbed forehead, where it hung upside down, and the long scorpion tail, longer than a man’s forefinger, arched up over its horny back.
The Umlimo began to mutter and mumble and a rime of white froth bubbled onto her raw lips. She said something in a strange language, and the scorpion on her forehead pulsed its long segmented tail, and from the point of the red fang at the tip a clear drop of venom welled and sparkled like a jewel in the dim light.
The Umlimo spoke again, in a hoarse strained voice and an unintelligible language.
‘What does she say?’ Bazo whispered, turning his head towards Tanase. ‘What language does she use?’
‘She speaks in the secret tongue of the initiates,’ Tanase murmured. ‘She is inviting the spirits to enter and take control of her body.’
The albino reached up slowly and took the scorpion off her forehead. She held the head and body within her closed fist, only the long tail whipped furiously from side to side, and she brought it down slowly and held it to her own breast. The scorpion struck, and the rigid thorn fang buried itself deeply in her obscene pink flesh. The Umlimo’s face did not alter, and the scorpion struck again and again, leaving little red punctures in the soft breast.
‘She will die!’ gasped Bazo.
‘Let her be,’ hissed Tanase. ‘She is not like other women. The poison will not harm her – it serves only to open her soul to the spirits.’
The albino lifted the scorpion from her bosom, and dropped it into the flames of the fire where it writhed and withered into a little charred speck, and suddenly the Umlimo uttered an unearthly shriek.
‘The spirits enter,’ Tanase whispered.
The Umlimo’s mouth gaped open, and little glassy strings of saliva drooled from her chin, while three or four wild voices seemed to issue from her throat simultaneously, each trying to drown out the others, voices of men and women and animals, until at last one rose above them, and silenced the others. It was a man’s voice, and it spoke in the mystical tongue; even its modulation and cadence were totally alien, but Tanase quietly translated for them.
‘When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime, then, warriors of Matabele, put an edge to your steel.’
The four indunas nodded. They had heard this prophecy before, for the Umlimo was often repetitious and always she was obscure. They had puzzled over the same words before. It was this message that Bazo and Tanase had carried to the scattered peoples of the Matabele during their wandering from kraal to kraal.
The gross albino seer grunted and threshed her arms, as though struggling with an invisible adversary. The pale pink eyes jerked in her skull, out of kilter with each other, so that she squinted and leered, and she ground her teeth together with a sound like a hound worrying a bone.
The girl-child rose quietly from where she squatted amongst the pots, and she leaned over the Umlimo and dashed a pinch of pungent red powder into her face. The Umlimo’s paroxysm eased, the clenched jaw fell open and another voice spoke, a guttural, blurred sound, barely human, using the same weird dialect, and Tanase strained forward to catch each syllable and then repeated calmly:
‘When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise, then warriors of Matabele take heart, for the time will be nigh.’
This time there was a slight difference in the wording of the prophecy from the one that they had heard before, and all of them pondered it silently as the Umlimo fell forward onto her face and flopped limply as a boneless jellyfish. Slowly all movement of the albino’s body ceased, and she lay like death.
Gandang made as if to rise,
but Tanase hissed a warning, and he arrested the movement and they waited, the only sound in the cavern was the click and rustle of the fire and the flirt of bats’ wings high against the domed roof.
Then another convulsion ran down the Umlimo’s back, and her spine arched, her hideous face lifted, but this time her voice was childlike and sweet, and she spoke in the Matabele language for all of them to understand.
‘When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross, let the storm begin.’
Her head sagged forward, and the child covered her with a kaross of fluffy jackal furs.
‘It is over,’ said Tanase. ‘There will be no more.’
Thankfully the four indunas rose, and crept back along the gloomy pathway through the catacombs, but as they saw the glimmer of sunlight through the entrance ahead, so their steps quickened, until they burst out in the valley with such indecent and undignified haste that they avoided each other’s eyes.
That night, sitting in the open-sided setenghi on the floor of the valley, Somabula repeated the prophecies of the Umlimo to the assembled indunas. They nodded over the first two familiar riddles, and as they had a hundred times before, they delved inconclusively for the meaning, and then agreed: ‘We will find the meaning when the time is appointed – it is always the way.’
Then Somabula went on to relate the third prophecy of the Umlimo, the new and unfamiliar riddle: ‘When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross.’
The indunas took snuff and passed the beerpots from hand to hand, as they talked and argued the hidden meaning, and only when they had all spoken did Somabula look beyond them to where Tanase sat holding the child under her leather cloak to protect him from the night chill.
‘What is the true meaning, woman?’ he asked.
‘Not even the Umlimo herself knows that,’ Tanase replied, ‘but when our ancestors first saw the white man riding up from the south, they believed that their mounts were hornless cattle.’